Some Germans
had lived in the city of St. Louis since it had been founded. Many
newcomers were eager to purchase land in the territory west of the
Mississippi. Before they could do so, they took jobs in cities like
Cincinnati or Milwaukee, to save enough money to enable them to become
landowners. Dr. Don Heinrich Tolzmannn in a chapter on "Settlement
Patterns" in his book The German-American Experience discusses
the importance of St. Louis "as a major distribution center for German
immigrants in the Midwest. Settlements extended north and south on the
Missouri as well as the Mississippi, where the Germans had come from
Ohio, Kentucky, Tennessee, Maryland, and Virginia. Later peasants from
Westfalen and Hannover arrived and were followed by barons, merchants,
officers, students, and clergymen."[27]

The greatest
influx of Germans occurred between 1840 and 1850 in the years
immediately before and after the unsuccessful German Revolution of
1848. One group of German immigrants that made an important impact on
nineteenth century North America, were a few thousand Republican
freedom fighters, generally referred to as the
Forty-Eighters. Dr. Tolzmannn describes them eloquently: "Most of the
earlier immigrants had been farmers, tradesmen, and craftsmen, but the
Forty-Eighters were well educated. They
were generally teachers, doctors, lawyers, editors, artists, and
musicians. It is no wonder then, that they were able to contribute to
a German-American cultural renaissance".[28]
Nowhere did the Forty-Eighters contribute more to this renaissance
than in Missouri and in the city of St. Louis. Carl Schurz, Friedrich
Hecker, Carl Daenzer, and others remind us of the influence of the
Forty-Eighters on politics, especially during and after the Civil
War. The Germans were for the most part anti-slavery and eager to
preserve the Union. In a book meant to attract and prepare prospective
German emigrants, Friedrich Muench, an early settler in Missouri,
wrote The State of Missouri portrayed with special regard to German
immigration. It was published in 1859 and contained an amazingly
detailed description of all aspects of life in twenty-seven chapters
from "Climate", "Wild Animals", "Farming", "Beer and Wine making",
"Constitution" and "Literature" to "Churches", "Slavery", "Nativism",
and "Important Missouri Cities other than St. Louis".[29] The book portrayed a very appealing aspect of
the state.

Religiously,
the German immigrants to Missouri were evenly divided between the
Protestant and Catholic faith. However, as early as 1834, St. Louis
established a service in the German language at the Old Cathedral,
which at that time was the only Catholic church in the city.[30] Several German Catholic parishes were founded
in St. Louis in the 1840's. In 1841 the
city had 30,000 inhabitants, half of whom were Catholics. In 1844 the
church of Our Lady of Victories was founded for a German congregation,
and five years later two additional churches, SS. Peter and Paul and
Holy Trinity, began to fulfill the needs of the growing German
Catholic population. One of the grandest of German churches in
St. Louis was St. Anthony. In the year 1858 several Franciscan priests
from Saxony, Westphalia, Silesia, and the Rhineland were sent to the
United States. They arrived in September in
Teutopolis, Effingham County, Illinois, where they built a
monastery. The following year one of the Franciscans was sent to
Quincy, Illinois, to establish a second monastery dedicated to
St. Francis Solanus, and three years later the Franciscans received
permission to create a parish in St. Louis for resident German
Catholics. Again it was Franciscan Brother Adrian Wewer, who was
assigned the task to draw up the plans for the new church dedicated to
St. Anthony.[31] Twenty-five years after the
1869 consecration of the church, the Souvenir book of St. Anthony,
still written in German, described the interior decorative paintings
by Wenceslaus Thien, the statues by the Schroeder Brothers, and
Wilhelm Lamprecht's murals.[32] All of these
German-American church artists had become well known by 1869 through
their works in different parts of the United States. St. Anthony
church was torn down in 1912, when a larger edifice was erected. None
of the original art works have been preserved.

This seems to
have been the fate of a majority of nineteenth century Catholic
churches that served German immigrants in Missouri. The two most
spectacular nineteenth century churches still standing in St. Louis
are St. Francis de Sales and SS. Peter and Paul. Rather than painters
or altar builders, St. Louis attracted German architects. A
significant number of them settled in the United States around
1865. Among them were priests or members of religious orders. The best
known was the Franciscan Brother Adrian Wewer, who designed the church
of St. Francis Solanus at Quincy, Illinois, and St. Anthony in
St. Louis. Making St. Louis his home base, Brother Wewer traveled
across the country to build monasteries and parish churches.[33] He had no training as an architect, yet seems
to have possessed a gift for remembering the structural intricacies of
his homeland's church buildings.

Two German
architects with impeccable credentials were able to leave memorable
church buildings in the American Midwest. Franz Georg Himpler and
Adolphus Druiding built Gothic revival churches for Germans during the
second half of the nineteenth century. It was Himpler who designed
SS. Peter and Paul in St. Louis. Himpler was born near Trier,
Germany, in 1833, and studied at the Royal Academy of Architecture in
Berlin between 1854 and 1858. In 1867 he
came to the United States and settled in Atchison, Kansas, where he
designed St. Benedict Abbey. Between 1873 and 1875 Himpler built his
German Gothic masterpiece in America: SS. Peter and Paul Church in
St. Louis. (Figure
104). The interior of the church is modeled on the Cathedral of
Cologne and the Liebfrauenkirche of Trier, Himpler's birthplace.[34] Unfortunately, the original interior
furnishings of SS. Peter and Paul are no longer in place, but this
German parish church of St. Louis still attests to the great talent of
its immigrant architect.

Adolphus Druiding was born in 1839 in
Hannover. He studied in Berlin and Munich and settled in St. Louis
after his arrival in the United States around 1865. He was more
successful in his career as a church designer than Himpler, because he
was willing to erect modest rather than grandiose buildings. St. Louis
and the Midwest were ideal locations for his practice. Druiding
designed a number of small churches in St. Louis. They have been
demolished or remain unidentified today. An early St. Louis church
building by Druiding was St. John Nepomuk, the oldest Czech
congregation in the United States. It was almost completely destroyed
by a tornado in 1896.[35] Later in his life,
during the 1880's, Druiding built larger parish churches for German
Catholics in many small midwestern towns. Typically he used red brick,
which was an inexpensive building material. The architect continued to
design churches into the 1890's. Around the turn of the century, a
group of second- generation German-Catholic architects took over. In St. Louis it was Viktor Klutho, who built the "
great Gothic monument of German Catholicism, St. Francis de Sales in
1907."[36] Klutho was also responsible for the
Benedictine Convent church at Ferdinand in southwestern Indiana. The
dome of the church is patterned after a Druiding design (Figure 105). The city of
St. Louis had historically nourished two generations of architects
with roots in German ecclesiastical building styles.

Also located in
St. Louis was the Emil Frei Glass Company, known for its beautiful
stained glass windows. A 1911 advertisement in a publication listing
The Notable Catholic Institutions of St. Louis and Vicinity
reminds the reader that "the Company supplied two hundred new churches
from New York to San Francisco with figure windows. Our work is equal in every respect to the best
imported."[37] The founder of the Company, Emil
Frei, was born in Bavaria in 1867, emigrated to the United States and
settled in St. Louis in 1900. He received many commissions and won a
grand prize at the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition in
St. Louis. After his death in 1941, his son Robert succeeded him in
the business.[38] There was a great demand for
stained glass windows in new Catholic churches in North America in the
late nineteenth century. Before Emil Frei opened his studio, Franz
Mayer had supplied artistically designed windows to U.S. churches of
German origin. The Mayer Company also exported religious statuary to
German-American churches during the second half of the nineteenth
century. It is important to recall the active commerce of
ecclesiastical art objects that tied Germany to the United States.

Abbot Boniface Wimmer's missionary zeal to
expand his Benedictine order's monasteries and teaching institutions,
led two priests from St. Vincent in Pennsylvania to Atchison, Kansas,
in 1857. By that year Abbot Wimmer had thirty-eight priests at his
disposal. The two priests set up a mission at Atchison with a generous
donation from King Ludwig's Ludwig-Missionsverein. The cornerstone of
the priory and college building in Atchison was laid in 1859. In 1866
Adolphus Druiding built St. Benedict Abbey church at the site.[39] In 1879 the German-American painter Johann
Schmitt of Covington, Kentucky, sent two canvases to his friend the
Reverend Innocent Wolf, who was abbot in Atchison at that time. One of
them depicts The Sacred Heart of Jesus, the other St. Joseph
with the Christ child. These paintings were personal gifts and not
commissions.[40] Repeated inquiries have failed
to establish whether the two art works are still at the Atchison
Abbey.

Looking back at the beginning of an
organized expansion by the German-American Benedictine Boniface
Wimmer, it is astounding that he managed to establish such a great
number of monastic settlements and parishes for his countrymen in a
relatively short period of time. He not only saw to the building of
churches, but also to the quality of art placed in their interiors. A
heritage of German religious art has been preserved through his effort
and that of the church artists he recruited. A wealth of beautiful
devotional art works was created by a group of German-Americans in
their adopted country. It remains for us to appreciate and treasure
their artistry.